My thoughts exactly. Maybe I need to go back to lit class, but I have absolutely no idea what the argument is here.

There was (is?) lot of drama between Zed Shaw and Rails. I don't even know if I could do it justice. Ruby had some... problems early on, and Zed can be... abrasive, especially in his persona he used to write his "Rails is a Ghetto" rants. This talk is best read as an artifact of that time, and nothing more than that.